Leaving L.A.

I've convinced my Dad, who will soon be celebrating his 76th birthday, to join me for a few days on the Longest Walk. Today we are driving out to Flagstaff, Arizona, where we will spend the night. Tomorrow we join the walkers.

Springtime in LA

A Response from Denise and Two More Poems

The sudden death of a friend is never easy, but especially challenging if it has been murder or suicide.

Now that I have been through this a few times, I know something about the stages of grief you go through--denial, anger, eventual acceptance, and in the case of suicide--guilt. ("I should have known, I should have been able to do something.")

But I forget that each death brings its own particular grieving. This one hit me on a very physical level, like my body and soul had been slammed by a truck.

But each death or loss also brings its own teaching. I know that the only way to really 'get it' is to go through the grief, to not get stuck in denial. So I have let myself have all my emotions and internal conversations about guilt and anger and pain and loss and even humour.


Then there are the conversations with Denise. Many people have talked and written about "after-death communication". What exactly this is we can't really know, whether it is our own hopes and feelings attached to mere synchonicities, or genuine communication from the beyond. My own belief says probably a combination of the two, since my own belief about the immediate afterlife is that we simply change form.

There is even a form of grief therapy now called "Induced After Death Communcation", where the patient is encouraged to 'get in touch' with their lost loved one.

So in the first few days after I found out about her death, I was hearing a running conversation with her in my mind. Some of it was painful, some of it comforting, some of it was funny. Just like Denise herself. "Death is painful but not as painful as life," she said. And "don't bother me, I'm busy with my family." And: "Lots of good-looking sailors over here."

Maybe it was just me talking to my own memories, maybe not. Guess I won't know til I get to wherever she is.

At one moment when I was in the middle of yet another argument with her inside my head, I said, "Okay fine, if you are really
are still out there somewhere communicating with me, prove it. send me another email...Ha, I bet you can't do that, can you? I don't mean some kind of internal dialogue thing, I mean a REAL message."

And then I sat back, smugly with my arms folded, waiting for what I knew was impossible to happen. In a few moments, I'll check my email and see if she really did send something, ha ha, which of course I knew she can't, then we'll be done with this After Death Communication hallucination once and for all.

These are the strange mental Grand Canyons grief sends you into.

At that very moment a hummingbird flew up to my window, and hovered the way hummingbirds do, their wings moving rapidly keeping them in one place. It stayed long enough to stare for a few long seconds directly into my eyes. Then it disappeared, rapidly, the way hummingbirds do.

And I felt the fluttering of these wings deep inside me, lifting me and making me laugh.

Thank you, I said.

Some messages don't end up in your computer, but in your heart, where they belong.

And we don't really know who sends them, do we?

------

Two more poems, send by Denise last year:

Poem: "Goldfinches" by Mary Oliver from Owls and
> Other Fantasies: Poems and Essays. © Beacon Press.
>
> Goldfinches
>
> Some goldfinches were having a melodious argument
> at the edge of a puddle. The birds wanted to bathe,
> or
> perhaps just to dip their heads and look at
> themselves,
> and they were having trouble with who should be
> first, and so on. So they discussed it while I stood
> in
> the distance, listening. Perhaps in Tibet, in the
> old
> holy places, they also have such fragile bells. Or
> are
> these birds really just that, bells come to us—come
> to
> this road in America—let us bow our heads and
> remember now how we used to do it, say a prayer.
> Meanwhile the birds bathe and splash and have a
> good time. Then they fly off, their dark wings open—
> ing from their bright, yellow bodies; their tiny
> feet,
> all washed, clasping the air.
>
>
>

> Poem: "Trust" by Thomas R. Smith, from Waking before
> Dawn. © Red Dragonfly Press. Reprinted with
> permission.
>
> Trust
>
> It's like so many other things in life
> to which you must say no or yes.
> So you take your car to the new mechanic.
> Sometimes the best thing to do is trust.
>
> The package left with the disreputable-looking
> clerk, the check gulped by the night deposit,
> the envelope passed by dozens of strangers—
> all show up at their intended destinations.
>
> The theft that could have happened doesn't.
> Wind finally gets where it was going
> through the snowy trees, and the river, even
> when frozen, arrives at the right place.
>
> And sometimes you sense how faithfully your life
> is delivered, even though you can't read the
address.

Earth to Denise

Earth to Denise:

I am sorry that you had to leave so soon.

I am sorry that beauty of who you were to all of us was not enough to convince you to stick around.

I have 61 emails that still remain in the 'sent' file of my email--my responses to emails that you sent, with your originals.

You frequently started your emails to me with "Earth to Lisa" because I was always flying around the world.

Like our long conversations on the phone, or our conversations over drinks at Vesuvio in North Beach, the emails held the things that were important to us and passed them back and forth--the freedom and challenge of becoming 'older women', making a living, men, rants about the state of the world and about the difficulty of finding hairstyles that worked,kindness, love, old North Beach poets, and being a white woman and a black woman in today's America. And poetry. Lots of poetry.

Thank you for holding the things that mattered in our all of our conversations. Thank you for all the hope and inspiration, the wise and kind words you were able to give to others but not yourself. And thank you, most of all--for the ability we shared to laugh our way out of well, almost anything.

I knew we were good friends because we could get really angry with each other and laugh about it later.

And yeah,I let myself have one last argument you when I found out about this. Yelling at you from inside my car driving through the Berkeley streets, a shout from this painful messed up and exquisite earth that keeps us here and teaches us over and over again about letting go until finally just maybe we get it (or not) and then it is our own turn to go...

Like most of us here on planet earth, I am selfish. I wanted you to stick around for
awhile. I wanted us to learn how to be old ladies together, still laughing about 'going out to North Beach and picking up sailors." I wanted
more poems, more evenings at Vesuvio, more delectable meals in which
you complain, again, about how much you love to eat.

But it was not to be. So fly, little bird. Fly home.

I will miss you.

Lisa

sent June,2007:

Lisa;
>
> I must be getting really old because I am sitting
> around in the middle of the day with so many
> important chores left undone while I amuse myself
> with these lovely little corny poems.
>
> And I thought I would share ...
>
> Denise
>
> p.s. ...this one must be read out loud, and don't
> worry about people thinking that you're crazy,
> because it's a well established fact by this point
> :- )
>
>
> Poem: "Long Afternoon at the Edge of Little Sister
> Pond" by Mary Oliver from Owls and Other Fantasies:
> Poems and Essays. © Beacon Press. Reprinted with
> permission.
>
>
> As for life
> I'm humbled,
> I'm without words
> sufficient to say
>
> how it has been hard as flint,
> and soft as a spring pond
> both of these
> and over and over,
>
> and long pale afternoons besides,
> and so many mysteries
> beautiful as eggs in a nest,
> still unhatched
>
> though warm and watched over
> by something I have never seen—
> a tree angel, perhaps,
> or a ghost of holiness.
>
> Every day I walk out into the world
> to be dazzled, then to be reflective.
> It suffices, it is all comfort—
> along with human love,
>
> dog love, water love, little-serpent love,
> sunburst love, or love for that smallest of birds
> flying among the scarlet flowers.
> There is hardly time to think about
>
> stopping, and lying down at last
> to the long afterlife, to the tenderness
> yet to come, when
> time will brim over the singular pond, and become
> forever,
>
> and we will pretend to melt away into the leaves.
> As for death,
> I can't wait to be the hummingbird,
> can you?

sent September, 2006

Around the corner I have a friend,
> In this great city that has no end,
> Yet the days go by and weeks rush on,
> And before I know it, a year is gone. And I never
> see my old friends face,
> For life is a swift and terrible race,
> He knows I like him just as well,
> As in the days when I rang his bell.
> And he rang mine but we were younger then,
> And now we are busy, tired men.
> Tired of playing a foolish game,
> Tired of trying to make a name.
> "Tomorrow" I say! "I will call on Jim .
> Just to show that I'm thinking of him."
> But tomorrow comes and tomorrow goes,
> And distance between us grows and grows.
> Around the corner, yet miles away,
> "Here's a telegram sir," "Jim died today .
> And that's what we get and deserve in the end.
> Around the corner, a vanished friend.
> Remember to always say what you mean. If
> you love someone, tell
> them. Don't be afraid to express yourself. Reach out
> and tell someone what
> they mean to you. Because when you decide that it is
> the right time it might
> be too late. Seize the day. Never have regrets.And
> most importantly, stay
> close to your friend s and family, for they have
> helped
> make you the person that you are today !
>
>

Sudden Death

I have delayed my trip to join the longest walk for a few more days because of the sudden death of a close friend. I'll be spending some time with family first.

More later.

Next: The Longest Walk Two, Across the U.S.A.

In just a few days I'll be re-joining The Longest Walk Two, which started here in the Bay Area with a sunrise ceremony at Alcatraz, and is now several miles south of here, near Twenty-Nine Palms, California. This Native-led group is walking across the United States in five months, to bring attention to sacred sites, indigenous issues and our treatment of Mother Earth here in the U. S.A. It's called "two", because it commemorates the first Longest Walk in 1978, when the U.S. tried to anull all of the treaties it had with Native nations.

I started out with them three weeks ago in the Bay Area, and walked for three days. Many, many interesting people on the walk, of all ages and ethnicities. June, a 60 year old Buddhist nun, has been doing similar walks for 30 years. For her, it is a practice that, unlike meditation, takes her out into the community. Emmet (His Many Lightings), is a 76 year old runner who started marathon running when he was 40, and hasn't quit since.

As one man on the walk said, "There are a thousand people in your heart you haven't met yet."

I think I'll meet a few of them on this walk.

The Longest Walk Two website is http://www.sacredrun.org

These Retro Times

Mask of Flowers
Originally uploaded by lisa.garrigues

Mercury, the planet of communication and short trips, is retrograde again, and will be until February 18. The usual response to this from astro-believers is panic and paralysis: don't sign any contracts, be extra-careful when you drive, and be prepared for cell phone glitches and computer meltdowns. People go around irritably muttering the mantra of "Mercury retro Mercury retro" under their breaths, because the "backward" motion of this planet seems to make speaking to anybody but ourselves highly problematic.
But that, I think,is the point of these Mercury retrograde periods: slow down,revise, review,reflect. Spend some time talking to yourself. Don't be in such a hurry to get places, get ahead, get over, or get your message across. I for one,welcome them, though I understand that the speedaholic demands of Our American Life conflict with what the universe may want from us, which is perhaps more a dance of balance, of breathing in and out, than an endless pushing forward.

Monkey on My Back

PICT0353
Originally uploaded by lisa.garrigues

Somewhere near Pilcopata, Peru, with a monkey on my back, in 2007.

Remembering a hot day in the jungle from cold and wet San Francisco.

Northwest Light

The sunlight in Washington State is like a rare jewel when it arrives, sparkling clean and pure on the evergreen trees, shimmering a luminescent blue with streaks of gold on the Dungeness spit as the sun slowly falls behind the horizon.

A spit is a long stretch of skinny land that juts out into the ocean water. It doesn't have a very romantic sound--and when you look at it on a map knowing its name it does kind of look like a long thread of spit that some giant standing on the mainland let fly.

But actually standing on the sand of the spit you are in a landscape of mist that huddles up next to you,then moves back to reveal in the near distance a boat, a tree, a heron, before sliding on again to reshape itself and the landscape.

This is not San Francisco coastside fog, with its harsh and often incessant wind. This is something far more delicate--it paints the landscape around you with a misty brush, shifting and changing, like a Japanese watercolor.

Evergreens shrouded in wise silence, punctuated by persistently conversational ravens. Long and cool narrow beaches scattered with white clam shells resembling the small hard wings of angels.

The angels may not always be visible, but they have left us, in this physical world, with tokens, reminders, evidence of their presence.

I walk the beach collecting these hard white wings in my hands,following the fluctuating presence of light. At the end of my walk, I let them fall again, emptying my hands for whatever is next.

Shopping for George Bush Terrorism and other Deals

I just love the creative ways my computer has come up with to get me to buy things. When I googled for information related to my last post, here's what it came up with:

Shopping for George Bush Torture Terrorism 2007?

Find George Bush Torture Terrorism 2007 any many other great deals at MonsterMarketplace!

Wow, sign me up.

But seriously folks, I've realized I need to do a serious about face about George Bush. Instead of constantly maligning him as many of us lefties have been doing for the past eight years, I need to thank him.

Yes, thank him. For showing me the shadow side of my own country, and of myself. For galvanizing a lot of us into creating better alternatives. For our country, ourselves, and our world.

So, GW, my dear sweet enemy-teacher, thank you.

Now would you please leave?

frog in the boiling water

If you throw a frog into the boiling water, it will feel the pain of the water. If you put the frog in the water and then slowly turn up the heat, the frog gets accustomed to it, doesn't feel the pain, and doesn't notice the water is boiling.

This story has come up several times for me in my travels back and forth to the U.S, as I jump in and out of the water.
Every time I return it seems the water has been turned up a bit more, and no one is noticing. A few years ago, when it surfaced that the U.S. may have been using torture for terrorism suspects, there was a lot of press and discussion. Some relatively low level folks were arrested. There was outrage. Now it just seems to be part of the common knowledge: yeah folks, that 's just the way it is.

Then there's the domestic spying, on peace activists, journalists, etc. It was good in a way to read media validation of what most of us already suspected. But what's being done about it now?

The other news that caught my attention is an article about the epidemic of obesity in this country, primarily among poor people, folks that live in Mississippi and Washington DC. And of course many of us in this country are carrying a few extra pounds.

What it all amounts to, INHP,is a kind of collective bloatedness, which is physically made manifest in certain communities and individuals. As if the layers of flesh on our bodies were a metaphor for the layer of numbness we seem to need to survive here. We consume a lot, yes, but what are we consuming? In the case of the poor diabetic folks in Mississippi, a most likely a lot of junk. Poison.

We should probably ask ourselves, with so many people gaining so much weight, what are we hungry for?

I also notice more desperation, more obsession with security. Has it always been this way and I haven't noticed, or is this a change? We are so highly trained in our individualism that we have forgotten how to find security in one another.

Okay, I'm on my soapbox ranting again. Forgive me. These are just my froggy observations.

At the same time that I am noticing all this, I have to also say that I am seeing increasing pockets of change and inspiration, like new plant growth sprouting up in a decaying sidewalk.

And our collective head and heart turning towards the wounding of the planet may be a sign of our own healing.

Stopping to Hear the Song

Whew, I'd also forgotten how fast everything here runs, how time-poor many Americans are. Those that are the working poor are running to pay their bills, and the rich, well they are also running to pay their bills, they just have higher bills. And of course everyone in debt. It's the American way.

So okay I checked out of the afternoon classes I teach to go to the dentist (more bills) and sit down in a cafe afterwards and watch people walking by. Maybe I'd had too much wine, I don't know, but all of a sudden it felt like I was being hit by little hammers of clarity, bam bam bam. In the sixties I had to take acid to get these kind of insights, you know, the kind you can't remember afterwards, but now all it takes is a sip or two of Chardonnay. Okay, it takes the whole damned glass.

So one of the many insights I had in this insightful afternoon was that I suddenly began hearing the individual songs of people. I mean as each person moved by me, I could literally hear their individual rhythm and voice call out to me... some people were kind of shlub schlub schlub, you know the fat guy with his shirt out and some messy notebooks under his arm ambling along, and others had high clear notes, perhaps with a little percussion to accompany them, like that high cheekboned blue-eyed Swedish girl with her pony tail pulled back swish swish swishing in the breeze, and her heels going clackety clack.

Suddenly I wanted not just silent me there observing all this, but the whole band to play it out loud. I wanted to round up a group of my musician friends so we could play back the songs of people as they passed.

Stop and try it sometimes, and see what you hear.

Glut

What is always a cultural shock coming back to the US of A is the amazing abundance of stuff we swim in on a daily basis...physical stuff, food stuff, informational stuff. And here in the Bay Area, I might add the rich and densely packed cultural mix we live in..anglos, francos, italianos, latinos, african-americans, asians of all persuasians, muslims, jews, indians from india, american indians. Amazing.

It is rich, it is beautiful, and yet I think it can also contribute to a kind of numbing out, a kind of overload. Most certainly, living here, we rarely step back to appreciate the abundance of stuff we have.

I am always astonished, returning from the developing world, to see television sets, sofas, CD players, boxes of books, just left out on street corners for anyone to pick up. The variety of mustards we can buy if we are so inclined, to put in our refrigerators. The fact that we even have refrigerators. Holy shit.

Nobody Goes Anywhere Anymore, We Just Transmute

Is "transmute" a word, or is it "transform"? My English is suffering, I'm afraid, after the year and a half speaking Spanish and the occasional pidgeon Quechua.

I am now physically in Berkeley, Ca. Yes these are my arms and legs and this is my head and I do believe I am all here in one piece.

Yet I go to this electronic box..and presto changeo..here are my friends in Peru, Argentina, Colombia! With all of their passion and problems and interests, just as I left them before. With You-tube I can even see them dancing or hiking or doing inane things around the house if they want me to.

In our electronic world, we don't go anywhere anymore, we just transform ourselves into bits and bytes, into emails or jpeg images or You-tube videos and do our work or hang out with our friends that way.
In Bolivia once, I traveled by bus with a 19 year old and reminisced a bit about what it was like travelling for me at her age. "Yeah," she said, her eyes wide like I had been to the North Pole and back in a bathing suit, "You traveled before there was email!"

Closing the Circle

Ironically, now that I am back "home" in the San Francisco Bay Area, I will probably blog more. I realize my entries during this last trip have been pretty thin. Probably because a great deal of my writing energy was caught up in doing journalism, and my energy was also caught up in simply moving from place to place. Homelessness as an art form.

Constantly writing in internet cafes didn't help my "reflective writing" much, either, though it was fine for writing articles. Usually I went to the internet cafes with the article already written in longhand, and then braved the noise (screaming little boys with video games, loudtalking tourists) and confusion and chaos of the place to enter what I had written. But this was probably better than the risk of carrying a laptop from place to place.

In many ways, the return from a long trip like this is often the most important time for me, it is a time of closing the circle, of seeing and digesting what the trip has actually given me, and perhaps also reviewing what, if anything, I have been able to bring to the place I have visited.

Some people talk a lot about the importance of staying in your own community, or with your own "people" (whoever the hell they are)and doing your work there. But for some of us, that is not at all our path. The concept of the traveler--the travelling healer, the messenger, the chaski--seems to be much more accepted in South America than in the North. And it is not just young people who do it. Here, with our mortage payments and our debt and our need to have "stuff", it is much more difficult.

Some people who choose to move around a lot do it in a more linear fashion, moving from one place to the next, and shedding like skins the lives they have set up in various places. But I have always been a more circular traveler, with the point of return being this multi-layered, multi-cultural place called the San Francisco Bay Area.

It is spring, and the weather is good. Here in the East Bay, the flowers are blooming. Welcome home, they seem to say.

Home Again

..and what exactly is that thing called "Home"?

I am in Los Angeles, the place of my birth, after a year and a half of South America. Every time I leave for a long period and return to the States it's like falling into a time warp. I return, read the magazines and newspapers and sometimes have no idea what they are talking about. What? A black man and a white woman as front runners in the presidential race? Schwarzzeneger on the cover of Time promoting environmentalism? (In his way of course, without any of those "girly" hybrid cars that might cause men's penises to fall off or something). New techie terms and tv shows I don't recognize...it's all like returning from a very long dream.

And yet, this time I am actually feeling positive about my return. Newsweek had a piece by a man who noticed how many people around him, particularly "conservatives" who had done an about face in their lives and politics. This is happening, he says, because people in the States are suddenly getting it that we are connected to the rest of the world.

Yes. I'm all for that.

And these huge supermarkets, with this abundance of food and variety. As well as the abundance and variety of different nations and ethnic groups represented on the streets...this is what the US of A has going for it, among other things. And this white guy Imus has been fired for trashtalking some black female basketball players, opening up a renewed dialogue about racism and sexism in our language and how much we let people, black and white, get away with it.

Yes. I'm all for that too.

Bolivian Education : A Long Way To Go

+
I've been having long talks with Marta Orozco, a friend who lives down the street, and a longtime acivist in indigenous movements here. She was one of the people who resurrected the ceremony of the Aymaran New Year in Tiwanaku, along with about 30 others from South America, and 5 from Canada. Also one of the first to bring in the Wiphala flag as the symbol of indigenous movements here. She is very warm, friendly, and also has very strong opinions, especially about the negative role of the Catholic Church on indigenous people.

Today her 16 year old son Huascar joined us in our conversation, and we talked a little about education in Bolivia. He says no Quechua or Aymara,the two main Native languages here, are taught in the schools. The books are there, but there's no one to teach the languages. Marta tells me that last year when he insisted on wearing his Chullo, the traditional Andean wool cap, to school, his teachers all told him he couldn't do it. The textbooks give pretty much the European viewpoint of view of the Conquest, though some of his teachers will add their own opinions. Former education minister Felix Patzi was trying to change things, bring more teachers of Native languages into the school system, etc. but he's no longer minister and now Huascar feels that everything has been left "up in the air." Some felt Patzi was trying to go to fast and was unrealistic about what could actually be done.

Indians here were not allowed to learn to read and write until 1952. I've heard stories about hands being chopped off and all kinds of atrocious punishments given to those who tried to learn, as well as to their teachers.

Morales has his work cut out for him.

Splat

It's carnival time in Bolivia...which means the streets of La Paz are packed with tiny kids shooting white foam out of waterpistols bigger than they are, teenagers in red t shirts drenching each other with waterbuckets, masks, yells, laughter, and the rumba rumba rumba of the Bolivian marching bands that have by now become almost background noise to me.

I'm installed in the Sagarnaga Linares district of La Paz, where I can walk down the cobblestoned streets in the morning to a buffet breakfast at the Sarai Hotel and then in to one of the internet cafes to work or just meander through the Net.

But during carnival time you have to be careful, because one of those little kids or teenagers is likely to see you as a potential target:splat.

In the nearby Plaza San Francisco, some miners from Huanuni and their family members have been staging demonstrations, climbing up on the front of the cathedral, and roping themselves to crucifixion crosses. Apparantly Morales wants to take them away from the mines they have been working as cooperatistas and send them to a different region, where there isn´t as much money.

Back to Bolivia

Back to Bolivia, just a few weeks after street battles in Cochabamba killed two people. The division in the country is apparant: one the one side, the indigenous and working class, most of whom still support Morales, and on the other, the wealthy and middle classes, who accuse Morales of "racism" and indigenous extremism at their worst, or simply muddle along feeling like something is slipping from their hands. Which it probably is.

There is talk of civil war, mostly in the foreign press, but I don't see it. I do see Morales trying very hard to keep the country together, which surely ain't easy with these kind of divisions. He recently replaced seven ministers and the news headline said he was adopting a more "consensual" attitude, after being criticized for being too confrontative. But now he is being criticized for not moving the country forward fast enough.

I suppose it remains to be seen what will be the best for Bolivia in the long run--keeping the country together, or allowing it to break up into, if not distinct nations, more autonomous sections.

Despite the political tension, I am happy to be back in La Paz. I have always loved this city: the surreal rugged stony mountains rising up around the city, with snow-capped Illimani in the background, the streets alive with all kinds of people: tall skinny white people, darkskinned businessmen and women in suits, fashionably dressed Latinas, Aymaran women in their bowler hats, elegant shawls, and wide, beautifully pleated dresses, boys leaning out of careening busses, shouting out the names of destinations, marketplaces filled with vegetables, candies, pharmaceutical products,anything you need.

When I return to the States, it's always the noise and song of Latin America that I miss most..the vendors singing and shouting, the caw caw caw of tropical birds, the people huddled in front of newspaper stands, discussing the daily news.

And yes, I will be returning within the next several weeks, so I'm trying to get myself psyched up for it, back into the different, Northern rhythm.

The Color of Ash

Alejandro is one of my Q'ero teachers. He's fifty six, and radiates the peace, humility and warmth I have seen in other Qero elders. His sister, another one of my teachers, is Maria Apasa Machaca, said to be the only Altomisayoq (high level Andean healer)left in the Qero nation, and definitely the only female Altomisayoq in a long time. To become an Altomisoyoq, you usually have to be hit by lighting three times. Maria seems to have survived it well. She's in her eighties, strong and vigorous. Alejandro tells me his mother had him when she was sixty, and lived to be over a hundred. That's how good the air is in the high Andes.

Alejandro also tells me that in the Qero Nation you have to be at least thirty before you can begin studying to be a pampa misayoq (Qero healer) and not everyone can do it.

We speak in a combination of his limited Spanish and my very limited Quechua. "You have to have luck (suerte) to become a pampa misayoq. Another pampa misayoq will read the coca leaves for you and let you know if you can take that path."

Today I performed a despacho with him, really the first that I undertook on my own, with his supervision. As usual I was impressed with the beauty and elegance of the process, a kind of artful unfolding of petals, coca leaves, seeds, candies and other items, as well as a powerful energetic connection with the forces of nature.

Actually putting the elements into the despachos with my own hands gave me a greater feel for each distinctive energy I was working with the apu masculine energy being quite different from the female pacha mama.

Alejandro and I don't seem to need to say much to acknowledge the energy of this work. "Allinta," he'll say. "It's good."

After making the despachos, we burned them both in the patio, in a small coal burning pot that I use to heat the house. We sat for a long time with the fire, praying, then he left me alone to pray on my own. After the fire burned down the pot had a fine white ash in it.

"VERY good," Alejandro said. "I didn´t expect it to be this good. I expected some black."

I was pleased. If you pay attention, you learn after awhile that what has long been called "superstition" is actually reading the language of nature: in the flight of a hawk or condor, in the visit of a spider, in the color of ash.

More than anything else I feel a deep sense of happiness after ceremony with the Qeros. Having escaped to the high Andes during the Spanish conquest they are carriers of an energy that is amazingly powerful and uncontaminated, a wisdom and innocence combined. It's not a head wisdom, but a heart wisdom. Somewhere I read that the Qero teachings contain an opening of different energy "eyes" that we have in our energetic field. Though none of my teachers have mentioned this, it is something that you simply begin to feel after awhile. Unlike Western teachings there seems to be little need to discuss analyze or evaluate the teachings one receives or experiences energetically.

I'm okay with that.